Web Design, SEO and Your Online Business
30 October, 2008 - Web Design - 7 Comments
Guest post by Patricia Skinner of Wellwrittenwords
Website owners persistently put off approaching a search engine optimization consultant until the design of their site is a completed project. The result is far too many online business owners who are committed to using a web design that is actually hampering their business, simply because it cost them so much money they think they can’t afford to scrap it and start again.
Talk about shooting yourself in the foot.
Even if it cost you $5,000.00 you’re better off scrapping a design that makes the search engines hate you. If it’s driving traffic away from your site and into the arms of your competitors then it’s a burden. A free CSS template, or even better a free WordPress CSS template will be an enhancement to your online presence. Once the money starts rolling in you can always think about hiring another designer for web site design that works, following these guidelines.
First a quick look at all the ways Web design can either further your online business goals, or drive them further off into the distance.
No Eyeballs? No Dice!
Let’s be clear that the whole point of having a web site is to get eyeballs, i.e. people who are interested in seeing what you have to offer.
The most common scenario with a negatively-optimized web site is no eyeballs at all. This is what happens with web sites that are so badly designed the search engines ignore them. And with every passing day they sink further into oblivion because more search-engine-savvy web site owners are bringing their sites more into line with what Google likes to see.
Another scenario, almost as bad, is where a web site gets plenty of traffic but it’s so badly targeted that 99.99 percent of visitors click away with a couple of seconds. How does this happen?
Keyword Usability
When you’re not using the right keywords the search engines have no way of telling who your message is targeted at. Most of the time this is because of a general misunderstanding of what keywords are for and how to use them. When I see the owner’s business name in the <title></title> tags it’s a sure indication of a general SEO disaster. Misusing your title tags in this way is search engine suicide because the engines take what’s between those tags as a major indicator of what your site is about. It may make you feel good to see your name in there, but how many people are going to type ‘fred blogs widgets’ into a search? Think for a moment what you do when you want to find something online.
Let’s say you’re looking for a couch for your living room.
You type in ‘couch’ and you get around 50 million results. Wow. Too much to wade through. So you type in ‘brown three-seater couch’ and you get a fairly short list of what you’re looking for. You may add a geographical location to your search too, for further refining. The more words typed into a search box, the more specific the results. This is what most Internet users do when they’re looking for something. They refine their search by adding words until they get a close description of what they want. Searchers almost never type in the name of a furniture showroom when they’re looking for an item of furniture, not even Rooms-to-Go.
So having got this important point out of the way, what is good Web design?
It is NOT Flash and iFrames.
Flash movies are a no-no because the engines can’t read text inside them, so if your main message is inside a flash movie you have a blank page as far as Google is concerned. This shows no sign of changing for the foreseeable future and there can be no denial that the inclusion of Flash movies seems to incur Google’s disapproval anyway.
Iframes is where a page is set ‘within a page.’ Again, it renders most of your message unreadable and un-crawlable to the engines..
Having a site that looks good is only a tiny part of the equation and it’s also the easiest to achieve.
In addition, good Web design should achieve the following objectives:
- Fast load time
- Plenty of good information for humans and search engines
- Professional appearance
- User-friendly
- Inspires trust in visitors
- Clear ‘call to action’
- Easily accessible contact info
And how can we achieve this?
Fast Load time
The first step should be to reduce the HTML of your site to the smallest file possible. This is easy to do when the design makes use of Cascading Style Sheets or CSS. Briefly, instead of having all the design elements on each page, common elements are accessed via an external CSS style file. This not only makes for pages that load fast, it makes the task of updating your web site much easier because only one file needs to be changed instead of every individual page. Keeping down the number of graphics you have on a page, and reducing their size wherever possible, will help tremendously to speed up your page loading time.
Good Web Content
As far as good web content is concerned the most important part of the page is the first paragraph right at the top. It should contain your keywords and should let the visitor know exactly what the page is about. It should be clear, readable and in font that’s large enough even for over-forties to read. Otherwise they’ll go somewhere else–trust me on this.
Professional, User-Friendly Appearance
The trend lately is towards clean, lean web design. There should be plenty of white space and fonts should be large enough and clear enough to read easily. Navigation should be simple and straightforward, and most importantly it should be consistent throughout the site. You want to avoid confusing your visitor while at the same time facilitate fast, easy browsing.
Inspiring Trust
Your contact info should be clearly visible. Lots of good contact and evidence of your interaction with other people and web sites can all enhance your trust rating. Think about putting your social media links in your sidebar, such as a link to your Twitter page, one to your LinkedIn profile and so on.
Clear Call to Action
What do you want your visitor to do? Make sure you make it clear to them. If you want them to click here for more info, then tell them and make it large enough to see immediately. If you want them to make a purchase then lay out your information clearly. They want to know what their choices are, where they need to go to pay, and that the payment process is safe and secure.
Easily Accessible Contact Info
It stands to reason that if a visitor wants to find out more they should be able to contact you as easily as possible, but it’s amazing how many professional web sites don’t have this information posted obviously. It makes me suspicious. How about you?
Are you starting to see how you can make your web site many times more useful to your visitors and ultimately your business?
To make a thorough analysis of your web site and decide what needs to be done, you might find these tools useful:
Google Webmaster is an amazing resource for anyone hoping to do business online. You will find clear guidelines on all aspects of site creation and optimization. Not to be missed.
Rank Checker from SEObook. This is a great tool for seeing how your web site presently ranks for your important keywords or search terms. You can check periodically to see what kind of progress you’re making. The great thing about it is that you can export results for easy comparison over time.
To check your stats I recommend either Google Analytics or a free account with GoingUp. It’s essential to be able to see where your visitors are coming from and how they found you, so you can fine-tune to do much more of the same.
A good place to start if you want to see results from your Web presence is a free 30-minute consultation via chat with Wellwrittenwords. This is a special offer for Jamie’s readers, so please leave me a message with Jamie’s name at the top.
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Posted on 30 October, 2008 by Jamie Harrop
Filed Under Web Design |
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Thanks for that excellent guest post, Patricia.
I would like to address one point. Author names in titles.
There’s one reason I publish my name in the title of all my pages. I’m a brand. Or at least I’m trying to build a brand around my name.
I can say for certain that I’ve received visitors from people who have seen my name attached to certain search results.
I agree, in most cases, the author name isn’t needed in the title. But if you’re trying to build a brand and reputation around that name (much like your business name), I recommend keeping it there, albeit at the end (most important info, the post title, always comes first).
Jamie
Hi Jamie, gotta tell you a story. I have a real estate agent client. When we first hooked up she was insisting that she should have her name in the title tag because that’s how she got found. I argued with her. Did it my way. Her traffic went up by several hundred times. Of course it wasn’t just that, it was other SEO tactics. But she was still being found for her ‘brand name’ it’s just that she was now also being found for other more important keywords. You might want to try. You have your brand name in the URL anyway, so anyone looking for you would find you. Don’t you want to be found for other things?
See that’s the thing, I’m found for other things too. (80% of my daily traffic comes from search engines and about 99% of that is for terms other than “Jamie Harrop”).
Putting my name at the end of my title has seemed to work well for me. The main phrases are at the start, and if somebody really wants to know who wrote it they can see my name at the end. It’s worked surprisingly well for me.
One of the other reasons I keep my name there is so I can keep the “Young Entrepreneur” aspect in the title. That phrase, combined with post titles, brings in a heck of a lot of good traffic. Just having “Young Entrepreneur” at the end of the title without my name would seem a little out of place, I think.
If I was struggling for SEO traffic I’d certainly remove my name and see what happened, but after I moved the name to the end and inserted the Young Entrepreneur phrase a few months ago I’ve seen a search engine traffic increase of about 120%.
Hope all that makes sense.
Jamie
I’ve found that same thing as Jamie, I usually include the business name at the end of the title. I would imagine this works better for established businesses instead of new companies.
Although I wouldn’t put it at the start, I always put what the company does at the start and the location of the company. Location doesn’t matter for many online companies but for a brick and mortar business it’s important.
Nicks last blog post..Soccer Is a Vicious Sport
Hi Nick, yes I recommend putting it after your chosen keyphrase (or title if you prefer). Works great and pleases most of us.
Patricia Skinners last blog post..Good Web Content: The Definitive Guide
[...] post is loosely in response to Jamie Harrop’s comment on my guest post over at his blog. Jamie disagrees with me, so no offense at what follows [...]
Hi Jamie and Patricia. Thanks for the info. I’m not too saavy on SEO, but I’m starting to store a lot of mb in my brain. I’ve recently created a huge list of keywords and actually find that looking at them alone gives me ideas for posts.
Davinas last blog post..A Ghostly Life Experience